Merciless Gods

  This was where it got hard. This was when his voice began to tremble.

  ‘I’d finish my shift at Time Out and I’d walk down the street to the school. I’d look through the bars of the playground and watch the kids play. I didn’t think about the girl; it was the boy I was looking for.’

  I didn’t dare look away from Mark. He was searching the floor as he spoke, his voice muffled, not braving the faces of our friends.

  ‘I knew that if I did something to the boy, that would hurt their father the most. I just sensed it, he was the kind of guy who would feel it the most if something happened to his son. Sometimes they would walk home from school alone, they didn’t live far. I followed them once: I now knew where they lived. There was nothing that didn’t go through my mind, how I could hurt that little boy, make him suffer, destroy him, punish him for what had happened to the dead man. There was no terrible thought that didn’t cross my mind. I wanted to do it. I wanted to do the unimaginable to him.’

  ‘My God, my God, what did you do?’

  Mark looked up, he smiled at Ingrid. A wide, humble, relieved smile. ‘Nothing.’ He squeezed my knee. ‘I did nothing. I walked away. I quit that job, I went back to study, I fell in love. I didn’t do anything.’ He let out a rush of breath, wiped the sweat from his brow and tipped his head onto my shoulder. ‘I came to understand how you could do the most terrible things because of hate.’

  I smelt him, the sweat and the smoke and the fear in him. I could smell the perfume of relief. How I miss that smell, how I still long for it.

  Hande crawled on her knees and collapsed into us, her arms around his and my shoulders. ‘You are such a good man,’ she whispered to my lover, holding his face and kissing him, her tears falling on both of us. ‘A good man doesn’t let hate dictate what he does. You are the best man I know.’

  Vince’s voice called out, cold and clear and hard, ‘But if you had done something to that boy, bashed him, fucked him, killed him, I wouldn’t have blamed you.’

  The words were too harsh. Even Mark recoiled.

  Hande swung around, furious. ‘That’s because you are not a good man.’

  It was exactly what we needed. She sounded so incensed, a mother defending her brood, that Mark burst into laughter. He hugged her, tickled her, until we were all on the floor together, giggling like children. Mark extricated himself from the melee, going to sit on the sofa. He put an arm around Vince. ‘He’s alright, is our Vince.’

  I never loved him more, I was never so proud of him.

  The laughter had not quite died out but Vince’s voice, assured and clear, sliced through it and we all fell quiet. ‘I’m not a good man,’ he agreed with Hande, unsmiling, looking at me, looking only at me. ‘It’s my turn.’

  I believed I was the only one among our friends who understood Vince, even though the unspoken undercurrents of our friendship, his indulgence of my obsession, might have indicated to anyone with any insight that our relationship did not rest on an equal footing. I was a fool, but that I did know him well. As he started telling his story I was aware that though he would have appeared calm to everyone else, assuming the unconcern of the born raconteur, there was a certain relish in his performance that evening. It wasn’t just the drugs: Vince Varkos had the constitution of an ox, I never once saw him lose control on drugs. This evening, though, there was perspiration on his upper lip, a tremor to his voice. Vince was flushed with exhilaration; he couldn’t wait to tell us all his story.

  ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold,’ he began. ‘Isn’t that what they say?’ I found myself nodding, as always his best, most attentive audience. ‘This is a story,’ he continued, ‘of how I exacted my revenge years after the fact. I should warn you that I am not proud of what I am about to tell you.’

  That was a lie. His gleeful tone betrayed him.

  ‘As Hande will attest, having also grown up in Westmeadows, our schools were full of migrant kids. There were poor Anglos, of course, but mostly we were Slav and Islander, Italians, a scattering of Greeks like myself, and lots and lots of Turks. The Turks dominated the schoolyard—wouldn’t you say that was true, Hande?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘we were definitely the majority.’

  ‘I had no idea you went to the same school.’

  Vince dismissed Serena with a wave of his hand. ‘We didn’t, but we were just down the road from one another. Broadmeadows, Westmeadows, Campbellfield, Fawkner, they were all close together. Wogs ruled. Unlike in your schools,’ he added.

  I caught the shared grin between him and Hande and a spike of jealousy went through me.

  ‘Now you have to understand, in this environment the fact that my mother was a widow, and an attractive young widow, was already a sign of difference. That I was also an exceptional student, a reader with little time for the sporting obsessions of my fellow students—that simply accentuated those initial feelings of being an outsider. For my classmates I was a soft Greek pansy and my mother was a slut.’

  ‘Surely the other Greeks didn’t think that?’

  Vince raised an eyebrow. ‘Hande, don’t be so fucking naïve, you’re from that world as well. My mother wore make-up, she took great care of her appearance and she refused to wear mourning black for more than forty days. The Greeks did not hide their envy and dislike for her. No, the Greeks were the ones who were most vile to her.’

  ‘Your poor mother.’

  Vince smiled once more at Ingrid’s comment. ‘My poor mama, indeed. By the end of fifth grade I found myself being bullied by three boys, all in my class, all Turks, all stronger and bigger than me—Omet, Hussan and Serkan. The one I hated the most was Serkan. He was the ringleader and he was the cruelest. Their teasing of me was relentless. On my way to school, at school, on the walk back home. They would steal my lunch, stop the other boys from playing with me. I didn’t mind their hitting me, their spitting at me, what I detested most was their constant slurs against my mother.’ His voice was raised and contemptuous. ‘Your mother’s a slut! A whore! You’re the son of a whore!’

  Vince drew a breath, that chilling smile still on his lips. ‘I used to wet the bed at nights, I even had thoughts of suicide. I know this all sounds melodramatic, but there you are. That is the cruelty of childhood. I offer you my experience as a counter to that noxious ignorant lie that childhood is innocent.’

  ‘Did your mother do anything?’

  Vince seemed taken aback at Serena’s question. He gave a curt shrug. ‘I said nothing to my mother. To tell her would have increased my torments tenfold.’ Vince’s smile was now a smirk. ‘Of course, it might have been different for you at a private school, Serena. I’m sure all your schools were much more civilised.’

  I blushed. I tried to catch Vince’s eye but he was deliberately avoiding my gaze.

  ‘One teacher did attempt to intervene. I still remember his name: Mr Clifford. He took me aside, told me that I needed to become more resilient.’

  ‘That’s a fucking stupid thing to say to a child who’s being bullied,’ said Ingrid.

  Vince seemed genuinely surprised. ‘On the contrary, it was good advice. To survive I had to become more resilient.’ He butted out his cigarette. Madeline’s hand reached for his but he moved away from her. I’m ashamed to admit that I felt a stab of pleasure at this.

  ‘It lasted a year. Those three boys were ignorant and dumb and are, I presume, still in Westmeadows, breeding further dumb and ignorant children. I went to the local high school until I sat an exam in year nine and won a scholarship to University High. And here I am, very far from the Omets, Hussans and Serkans of this world. But I won’t ever forget the agony and humiliation of that year.’

  I was concentrating so intently on what Vince was saying that Marie’s snort of exasperation took me by surprise. ‘Really, Vince,’ she said, ‘we’ve all been bullied at school. You surely can’t still be wanting revenge on three primary school boys, can you? My God, after all these years?’

  There were ver
y few occasions when Vince was lost for words, or betrayed any weakness, but this was one. But, almost immediately, he regained his composure. His lips formed a tight snarl as he turned to her.

  ‘You’re so the model of the university-educated left-wing feminist, Marie.’ He tilted his head then, in mock deference. ‘Compassion and forgiveness for the nameless and the stateless, righteous piety and judgemental moralism for everyone else.’ He turned to face Ingrid. ‘I’m sure Marie here would have agreed with Mr Clifford that all I needed was resilience.’

  Marie seemed to want to interject at this moment but Vince spoke right over her. ‘No, I bear Omet, Hussan and Serkan no ill will. That would be churlish. Those cunts mean nothing in this world.’

  ‘So what’s all this got to do with revenge?’

  ‘Ah!’ Vince looked delighted. ‘Now we can get to the nitty and the gritty. Now I have described to you the world I lived in, the world dominated by Omet and Hussan and Serkan. I got the scholarship and left that pathetic world behind.’

  His voice had returned to its usual sardonic tone but I was not at all fooled by the casualness of his speech. There was real pride in him now; he sat with his legs apart, his white shirt open at the collar, his dark tie loosened. He possessed the sofa as he possessed the room, and I wanted to kiss his neck and his handsome, serious face.

  ‘I think it was the happiest day of my mother’s life, even more so than when I graduated from university. By then she already knew that I had escaped the working class. Her mantra throughout my school years, from the earliest age, was that I should study, read, better myself.’ He turned to Marie. ‘I’m sure you’d deconstruct her aspirations as insufferably phallocentric and bourgeois, but she didn’t want her child to be condemned to the same monotony that characterised her working life. The day I got accepted into Uni High was the happiest day of her life.’

  ‘I don’t condemn your mother’s aspirations.’

  Vince hardly seemed to notice Marie’s objection; he continued, his voice still infused with pride. ‘She wanted to take me to dinner. There were two cousins I was close to and she also asked that I invite friends from school. My closest friend was called George, another Greek and another bookworm.’ Vince glanced casually at me, then looked away. ‘I think, looking back on it, he was gay.’ He shrugged. ‘That doesn’t matter. The person I most wanted to be there was Nazin. She was a Turkish girl in my class, the only other student who came close to equalling me scholastically.’

  There would have been a few catcalls at this unself-conscious vanity—from Ingrid or Antony—but Vince would not have cared. He had no idea why conceit would be considered a negative quality.

  ‘Nazin once received a better mark in a maths test than I did and I was gutted for days, just gutted. From then on I resolved to do better than her. I do believe that this competition spurred me on to be an even better student, and I thought that even though we rarely talked to one another she too understood and enjoyed the thrill of our intellectual combat. Because of it I became obsessed by Nazin—I believed I loved her. I dreamt about her, created conversations between us as I walked to and from school. In my fantasies we both had brilliant futures in the arts or the sciences or in politics, we would get married and we would have many, many kids, we would travel the world, we would be famous.’ Vince’s eyes were closed and I doubt that any of us had ever seen him so transfixed. He had never once in all the years I had known him talked about love, of that experience and of that emotion. But it was clear as he spoke that night that he did indeed know something about love. It hurt me, I am ashamed to say. Even without looking at her, I knew it hurt Madeline as well.

  Vince opened his eyes. They were cold, hard, unyielding. ‘Your typical self-obsessed teenage fantasies, of course. But this was how I felt and I was convinced Nazin had to be there at dinner, to celebrate with me. I mustered all my courage and one day after class I invited her. It was awful. I stammered and I blushed and I could hardly get the words out. In the end she took mercy on me and explained that she could not come to a dinner with me, that her father would never allow it. But it’s okay, it’s okay, I told her. My mother will be there, I’ll get her to phone your dad and he’ll know there’s nothing to worry about.’ His voice calmed again. ‘But this seemed to agitate her and I said nothing more.’ He turned towards Hande. ‘I put it down to another example of Turkish girls being enslaved by their fathers. It didn’t once occur to me that Nazin would not want to celebrate with me. But a few days afterwards I was in the locker corridor talking with George about the dinner. An Omet or a Hussan or a Serkat overheard us and started teasing me. I didn’t care, I was soon to be out of there—what harm could their words do me? Noticing that his abuse was having no effect, he called out down the corridor.’

  Vince leapt to his feet and began baying. He held us captive, an actor on a stage. I could see the claustrophobic narrow corridor, feel the rush of bodies around the lockers. ‘Hey, Nazin, didn’t this poofter Vince invite you to dinner? I wanted to die, not because of what he had said about me, but I would never have wanted to humiliate Nazin. I think at that moment I was prepared to punch him: I would have been beaten but I would have been defending her. So idiotically romantic were my fantasies. Except he went on, shouting, laughing: As if Nazin would ever accept a dinner paid by a whore’s wages, as if. As if! Those last two words he literally sprayed across my face.’

  Vince sat back down. I could not look at him. None of us dared look at him.

  ‘I was looking straight at her.’ His voice had lowered, he once again sounded unconcerned. ‘She said nothing but for a moment I saw a small sly grin that told me everything I needed to know. She agreed with him, she agreed with all the Omets and Hussans and Serkans of this world. That grin disappeared as soon as she saw me looking at her but I was never to forget it. That afternoon I went home, waited for Mum to get there and told her I wanted dinner to just be us. She protested, but I convinced her that was what I really wanted. For the night of the dinner she bought a new dress, I still remember it, a white frock with red floral swirls, she did her hair and she bought me a new jacket and new shoes. I laughed and talked and was excited all through dinner, not letting on that inside all I could think of was Nazin and that cruel disdainful grin. I’ve never been able to forget that grin.’

  ‘How did you get your revenge?’ Mark’s question was so quiet that we almost did not hear it. He seemed fearful asking it, as if Vince’s story had taken us far from the confines of a parlour game.

  But Vince clapped his hands together and grinned at him. ‘Yes, yes, of course, revenge. Let us get to what really matters.’ He leaned back in his seat, his finger tracing the stubble under his bottom lip. I thought he was figuring out how best to resume his story, but now I wonder if he was gauging how far he had reeled us in, whether we were there for the taking. In the pause, Serena rose, grabbed more bottles and refilled all our glasses.

  Vince watched her fill his glass, then raised it, sipped, and began to speak. ‘As you all know, I had a great time after I finished my studies, travelling in Indonesia and Thailand. I’d hooked up with a German girl there, Angela, and she invited me back to West Berlin. I loved Asia but I was hanging out for the bright lights and flushing toilets of Europe. Berlin was astounding. The wall hadn’t fallen yet but you could tell there were seismic shifts just about to happen. It was crazy, I didn’t sleep, I took a shitload of drugs, I partied every night. It was the most decadent place I have ever visited. Angela knew this DJ, a Kurd called Rajan, and he threw the best raves, they went on for days. He and I hit it off immediately. He was a migrant kid as well, we understood each other. Soon after I got there, Angela left me for a woman—’

  ‘Score one for our team!’ yelled out Ingrid.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I decide to head to Greece. Rajan tells me he is holidaying in Turkey for the summer and we decide to meet up in Istanbul.’ All of a sudden, with great force, Vince slapped his knee with the palm of his hand; it cracked
like a gunshot through the apartment.

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered. ‘Fuck, we are so far away here, so far away from life.’ The look he threw Marie was fierce. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’

  ‘I think I do,’ she replied calmly.

  ‘Didn’t you just love Istanbul?’

  Vince grinned at Hande. ‘Yes I did—it was the second most decadent place I have ever been. Rajan took me to these raves there, to gigs where two hundred screaming Turkish punks in Che Guevara T-shirts and anarchist tattoos were jumping around like it was 1977 while all the time behind the bar a picture of bloody Atatürk hangs on the wall.’ He grimaced at Hande. ‘What is it with you Turks and that arsehole?’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s the law. Every venue has to display his picture.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear his weasel eyes always looking down at me, wherever I was, whatever I was doing.’ He shrugged, in imitation of Hande’s nonchalance, and returned to his story.

  ‘I danced, I ate, I fucked and I danced some more in Istanbul. The one unintoxicated moment I had I wandered into the Grand Bazaar to buy my mother a necklace. My grandmother always used to say that the best gold in the world comes through Costantinopoli, and it must be true because there is stall after stall after stall of gold being weighed and displayed. I finally found a beautiful crucifix for her, simple but solid gold, and I bought it for her as well as a solid gold chain.’ As he was speaking he seemed unaware that his fingers had reached for his exposed neck, that he was softly stroking the underside of his chin.

  ‘After a week in Istanbul, Rajan invites me east to where his family are from. We travelled on buses for days until the West just disappeared. It was mountains, desert, mountains, desert and soon there are signs pointing to Iraq, Iran, Syria, and all these places in the Soviet Union I’ve never heard of. We’re on this 1950s bus with Turkish peasants staring at us as if we’ve just descended from the stars. Not just me, they think Rajan is an alien as well. We might both look like wogs but he’s got brand-new Adidas runners on his feet, a Happy Mondays T-shirt, a mohawk, plugs in his ears. He’s a Berliner through and through. I want to laugh, I want to hoot, I’m in the backblocks of Turkey and having a wonderful time. But I notice that the closer we are getting to Rajan’s home the angrier he gets, the more he’s telling me in his German English that he can’t stand the Turks, that they stink, that they’re inhospitable, that they’re savages. I realise that this dude hates the Turks with a red-hot hereditary passion. They’ve imprisoned my uncle, he tells me, they’ve stolen our lands, they are murderers, animals.’ Vince had thrown his arms in the air, was gesticulating wildly; I could see the bus, the scorched open road, the Kurdish friend next to him, I could see it all. Yunan, Yunan, he kept saying to me, gripping my arm, you and I are Greek and Kurd united against the Turk. It’s like the further east we head the less of a German he became. The more he remembers his hatred, the less a European he is. I myself don’t give a fuck. Omet and Hussan and Serkan are a lifetime away, I left them dying a long slow suburban death in Westmeadows. I want to sing, I want to breakdance, I want to fuck every single one of these peasants, every toothless man, every covered woman, every bright-eyed child on that bus.’